A picture of misery

I’ve just read Future of the Left’s new collection, How We Live Now: An Anthropology of Ourselves, and I recommend you do too. Thirty-two pages, ten essays and an introduction, all doable in one sitting. If you’ve got to be upbeat at your next meeting or social do, read it afterwards. It achieves the rare feat for a collection of essays by adding up to something greater than the sum of its parts.

It paints a picture of misery.

Turn the collection’s title into a question – how do we live now? – and the answer it gives us is along the lines of ‘unhappily, alone’. Piece after piece describes a nation struggling under the weight of its own depression, unable to adapt to a world of screens, atomised where the past – or at least a recited version of it – promised strong bonds and a life worth living.

The darkness is everywhere. The man in Wigan the local teenagers call a crackhead, who has just killed a pigeon and says he’ll cook it for his dinner. The lads still living with their parents who could be better off than when they were growing up but spend their money on beer and coke. England fans in a Putney pub performing feelings they don’t have. An old man found dead in his hallway, his house burgled after the funeral, his sewing tin torn open and scattered across the floor.

Then there’s the mood music we’ve grown used to. A customer in Thanet who watches immigrants who don’t speak English push in front of him at the till, while he pays “through the nose” in tax. Young professionals with no hope of owning the kind of house they grew up in, or of doing better than their parents. And a “neighbourhood panopticon” of Ring doorbells that might catch a parcel thief but has replaced the neighbours.

Modern Britain. Heating off, huddled under a blanket of depression.

Strikingly, those who have climbed from under it carry a kind of guilt, or at least unease, that spills onto the page. Bradley Strotten, son of a care nurse and an HGV driver and now a company director based in Dubai, betrays it best. He has “earned (a strange word) mobility but lacks belonging", calling himself “a Blairite dream”. I should declare an interest. I was born in Bootle, went to a Liverpool comp, then uni in London, and I work for Tony Blair. I’m the Blairite dream too. I know the pull of the place you left. I just don’t think the answer is guilt.

Bad policy, not just bad luck

In his excellent introduction, Tobias Phibbs warns that policy made in a political vacuum “can’t see the wood for the trees, and the public feel it.” He’s right. A politics that is bloodless and lifeless, that turns up with the right answer and then departs the stage, won’t survive. It won’t even work. It isn’t really politics.

But he is careful to add that politics needs technocrats and good policy improves lives. The collection proves it from the other side, because so many of the grievances woven into that blanket are the product of bad policy – especially our broken welfare system. In a hospital waiting room in the small hours, one writer meets a woman with a learning disability who has to fill in PIP forms to prove she can’t fill in forms.

Perhaps the collection’s greatest contribution to the future of the left isn’t what it tells us about how people live, but what they live without.

Identity.

It’s strange. In a world where the left’s blind embrace of identity politics made identities readily available – gender, ethnicity – author and subjects alike seem to be yearning for something bigger. A collective identity. You can see it in Arthur Downing’s essay on the old friendly societies, with their “daft name and a real purpose”. A West Ham fan who would rather watch England at home finds it for ninety minutes against Argentina: “the feeling of being part of something larger”.

This is where I think the political response to Britain’s collective depression lies. A national project to reverse its driver – economic and public service decline – that people can find themselves in. One built around the future and a clear appraisal of the world we’re living in.

It needs something the collection barely mentions: political leadership. Perhaps for good reason. We’ve been starved of it. Picture a similar collection written in the 1980s; it would be peppered with Thatcher. Blair in the 90s. Here, Keir Starmer gets a single line in the introduction, as a politician who never seemed to come from anywhere, and Andy Burnham appears once, in an essay on Wigan, as the new prime minister whose “Makerfield test” sent Westminster back to Orwell.

Nostalgia is a poor guide

The collection seems to sense the crossroads: go back, or go forward. The introduction closes by saying the place the Labour movement began “is where it should return.”

The easier pick is the rear-view mirror. Weren’t things nicer then? Didn’t we all just get along? Perhaps. There’s a simple test: run the collection’s own exercise in earlier decades.

Write it in the 1970s and the author is one of the lucky few. Around one in twenty young people from manual working-class backgrounds went into higher education. Today more than one in four children who grew up on free school meals – a tougher test of disadvantage – are in higher education by 19. Our 1970s essay writer would describe rubbish piled high in squalid public spaces and draw on a year - say 1979 - that lost almost 30 million working days to strikes. If they were from Merseyside, they’d talk of gravediggers walking out and coffins stuck in a warehouse in Speke. Their parents would have fought in the Second World War.

Write it in the 1980s and it’s three million on the dole, with unemployment peaking at 11.9 per cent in 1984. The gap between rich and poor, which had narrowed for forty years, widening dramatically. Industrial heartlands hollowed out while a capital city boomed for anyone without a hint of a regional accent. Our imaginary Merseyside writer would draw on the aftermath of the Toxteth riots, unaware that Thatcher’s chancellor was privately telling her that “the option of managed decline” for Liverpool should not be forgotten.

The 1990s collection? Mood is lifting. Britpop, Cool Britannia, Euro 96, when “Three Lions” was brand new and “it’s coming home” meant something. But at the turn of the decade, tens of thousands of homes were being repossessed. Unemployment was back above three million in the winter of 1992–93, and crime peaked in 1995. The Ring doorbell generation may be lonelier, but it is a great deal safer.

Today’s malaise is real, but nostalgia is a poor guide. The belonging and identity these essays occasionally mourn for were built for the conditions of its time, and one of the sharpest lines in the collection is that “we have forgotten how to invent new social forms”. Correct. That’s an argument for going forward, not back.

Forward, not back

The harder choice is to drive Britain forward.

Take on the grievances over immigration and failing integration, rather than wishing them away. The Thanet essay puts it better than most politicians: when you’re asked to be generous out of very little, “every sign of unfairness is humiliation.” The answer isn’t to tell the man in the Aldi queue complaining about immigration that he’s a bigot. It’s a system people can see is controlled and fair, where those who come learn the language and pull their weight, and where integration is something we lead on rather than leave to chance.

Don’t be beholden to technology but don’t hold back its development. Shave off its excesses and stay alive to the new ones; one writer’s “at ease” test, whether your companion can sit alone for a few minutes without reaching for their phone, is one most of us would fail. Promote a good life that is off screen and outdoors.

And treat the nation’s health as a national project. As Britain faces up to global insecurity and the real risk of war, a country’s resilience starts with the fitness of its people. Wigan, the collection notes, is Britain’s obesity capital, with seven in ten overweight or obese. Build the nation’s fitness, help the country recover from its physical and mental sickness, and make sure everyone who needs obesity-fighting drugs can get them, not just the ones who can afford them.

Don’t shy away from the technology that catches criminals and makes our lives safer. But don’t leave it to a WhatsApp group and a row of Ring doorbells. Put it at the heart of a future-facing police force. This runs against the instinctive reach for more ‘bobbies on the beat’ or ever more local police, but it addresses the very real decay brought to life in the collection.

Above all, go for growth. This isn’t a story removed from the lives of people documented in the essays. It isn’t a neoliberal pursuit. It’s about prosperity and aspiration. The father of one writer got his first pay rise in almost two decades. Almost two decades. That’s how long Britain has been stuck in its doom loop of low growth and low investment and we count the cost in slim pay packets that have lost the fight against rising prices. A country starved of prosperity stops believing in getting on, and those who do get on start to feel like deserters.

So here is the collective identity I think these essays are reaching for without naming it: aspiration. Not a private escape hatch for a lucky few, but a shared national project. An agenda for Britain that people can find themselves in. A new aspiration for a country starved of prosperity. And a plan to push that aspiration, and the prosperity that pays for it, into every postcode. If that’s the future of the left, then this essay collection is a real service to it.

The world is shifting on its axis. Artificial intelligence will transform the economy and potentially life as we know it. Its use on the battlefields of Ukraine has reshaped warfare and it is supercharging scientific discovery with more than 170 AI-discovered drugs in clinical trials. The fight for tech supremacy has upended geopolitics, culminating in a battle for power between China and the United States that has torn through the post-war rules-based order. Everything is changing and we are in the eye of the storm, living it, absorbing it, struggling to comprehend it as it plays out in real time on our screens.

This should be the time for a politics that is ruthless in its quest to understand a changing world. For a politics that does not shy away from honesty with the public about the trade-offs change forces upon us, thrown up by our wrecked public finances, our necessary relationships with the superpowers remaking our world or the adoption of technology itself. And for a politics that prizes the right answer, however difficult, above everything else, and ties those answers into an agenda for the country that gives it a stake in the future. A plan people can see themselves in.

This should be the time for New Labour.

The country needs it. The party won’t have it. Labour cannot decide what to do with the tradition that won it three elections. Sure, it hires New Labour people and borrows New Labour positions but every few years since 2010 it has convulsed over whether to throw it out altogether. The party’s other traditions – Blue, Soft and Old – have found it easier to define themselves against New Labour than to say what they are for, as they run the same warm bath of nostalgia that powers conservative forces at home and abroad. Their instinct is to deny that New Labour is a tradition at all, pushing it to the margins as an aberration, a moment in time that ignorantly embraced globalisation and abandoned the working classes it was elected to represent.

This is just plain wrong, and it is wrong about Labour’s own history. New Labour is not a set of manifestos gathering dust but the newest chapter of the party’s oldest argument. Labour has always had a revisionist tradition. Whether it was Gaitskell trying to rewrite Clause IV 35 years before it was rewritten or Crosland arguing that socialism was about equality, not who owned the means of production, the tradition holds the party’s ends as fixed and its means as open to argument. New Labour was it winning, three times. Its critics may wish it had resisted globalisation, but anyone with the faintest interest in history, economics or the human condition knows that stopping it was never possible. Instead, globalisation was harnessed. It brought the minimum wage, growth across the nation and opportunity in every postcode. Millions were lifted out of poverty. The New Labour tradition put parents and kids before schools, the patient before the NHS. It put people first and defined itself against the future, harnessing change and bending its arc to progressive ends.

Why New Labour sits on the margins today has more to do with the internal politics of the Labour Party than with any appraisal of what wins elections and sustains governments. But those of us who believe in it bear some responsibility too. After 2010, it was carried by personalities more than by a school of thought, and a tradition carried by personalities rises and falls with them. The ideas kept coming, not least from its original architects, but what stopped was the thing that made them New Labour: an approach to politics that builds ideas into an agenda and argues for it. That is the job now.

If globalisation was “the thing” in the ’90s, then technology is “the thing” today. An agenda that harnesses it can be summed up in four words.

Technology for the many.

A murmur of groans will meet this. Some will say, Of course someone from the Tony Blair Institute is banging on about technology. But this misses an important point. Technology is reshaping our world. Ignore it at your peril. Resist it at your futility. And to the cries of “technocrat” that will greet this piece: this is not divorced from values. Far from it. New Labour does not differ from other Labour traditions in its values – opportunity, fairness, social justice – but it does differ in how those values are deployed. Where others use them as a lens through which to assess change and reject it, clinging to a status quo that is being rejected by voters themselves, New Labour uses them to shape change and decide who the harnessing is for.

The prime minister is right to commit to a ten-year plan. It is what the country wants more than any short-term, tactical fix. But it cannot be another political device, waved at the country like plans that have gone before it. It must not hold back in its diagnosis. We have a state with no more money to spend, an economy that will be hurt by tax rises and a wasted decade that has consumed six prime ministers as they’ve failed to arrest Britain’s decline. Those are not problems the past can solve. They are solved by facing the future, by the New Labour way.

The plan should be built around harnessing technology, and giving Britain the power to do so: cheap energy, sound public finances, powerful military, strong borders and strong alliances with America and Europe.

It should mark the end of taxing and spending our way to better public services. Reforming (or better yet, transforming) them should be prioritised and the approach to this must speak to the age we are in. People hand over their private data to private enterprise for cutting-edge services. Health, education and welfare should not be any different, and yet we’re more likely to sink progress with a debate about privacy. Digital ID should return not as “show us your papers” but rather to enable people to collect their data in one place and choose who to give it to. What “choice and competition” were to the government of 1997, “data-driven, personalised, preventative and always on” should be to the government of today.

This means a national prevention service. Measuring health through waiting lists is outdated. We should be measuring progress in healthy years added to lives. Innovations in therapeutics and diagnostics are accelerating at lightning pace, GLP-1s can make a dent in the national obesity epidemic and the shingles vaccine has been linked to a fifth lower risk of dementia. It cannot be that the rich pay privately for these while the rest of the country waits for an outdated system to give them what those with money already have.

The social-care system causes misery for millions of families, and it belongs at the centre of government’s thinking. The debate has been stuck on how to fund an ever-growing system for the best part of two decades. There is no magic formula waiting to be discovered, but technology does give us an additional entry point to solving this crisis. Start with somebody at 60 and ask how they spend more of the next 30 years healthy and independent, and social care becomes health policy. Dementia is one of the biggest drivers of demand for residential care, costing the UK £42 billion a year, rising to £90 billion by 2040 – and just 1.4 per cent is spent on its diagnosis and treatment. The plan should be about the drivers of dependency as much as the financing of it.

Then there’s the NEETs crisis. The government is right to treat it as a priority and to think in decades rather than budget cycles. But the instinct so far sits on one side of the equation: skills, support, readiness. A young person can be ready for an opportunity, but somebody has to create it. On this, Britain has a supply problem, and this will only be fixed by creating the conditions in the private sector to make it cheaper and more attractive to hire a young person. When the real statutory cost of employing an 18-year-old is around 40 per cent higher in 2025 than it was in 2015, we have a problem – and policies that sound progressive one at a time can work against each other when assembled.

Britain must also deal with one of the biggest drivers of economic malaise: poor mental health. Comparable countries are facing increased diagnoses, but Britain is an outlier in how many people move onto benefits because of them. We count the cost in economic inactivity across all age groups and strained funding for what should be key priorities in the age we’re in, including defence and security, but the biggest cost is borne by young people themselves. Lives should be purposeful, and where someone can contribute to society, they should. Fuelling the opposite, even indirectly, is a blight on our politics. For a condition that does not limit work, the progressive answer is treatment and support that keeps them in work, not a cash transfer that keeps them out. We cannot wait for this, and an emergency handbrake on new claims for non-work-limiting conditions should be year one of the plan.

Devolution has become a powerful organising idea and, for much of the party, the correction of a New Labour sin. Except New Labour built the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Mayor of London, and asked the North East if it wanted an assembly too (and the North East said no). Today’s thirst for devolution is really a symptom of decline itself, felt most sharply on the high street and in the breezeblock job centres, especially outside London. It is that decline a New Labour agenda exists to correct.

Devolve where it’s right, not by default. People care more about what decision is taken than where it is taken. And while devolution is far from a guarantor of growth, the fiscal case for it is unanswerable. Since the poll tax, central government has collected 92 per cent of all revenue, against an OECD average of 53 per cent. Give places the means to compete for investment and a real stake in the growth they generate. Let Clean Power 2030 give way to Cheaper Power 2030, with zonal pricing in place of a national investment climate built for windfarm investors, so that the places that make the power can host the data centres and modern factories that need it.

Then keep at the centre what only the centre can do, and in the age of AI that is more than it was. Britain is almost 70 million people on less than half the land of France. One health system. One grid. You can cross it in a day (even on our trains). A country like that can build a national AI stack that ten mayoralties never could, and when fraud and cyber-crime now account for almost half of all crime, it needs fewer, more specialised police forces. It would be perverse to fragment the advantage geography gave us.

None of this works in isolation. And core to the country’s future is its relationship with Europe. But not this Europe, and not this Britain. In a world shaped by power and technology, Europe has too little of either. Two years on from the seminal Draghi report on European competitiveness that laid out the path to correct that, fewer than one in six of its recommendations has been fully implemented. Britain, meanwhile, has to rejoin from a position of strength, not as a supplicant. So we should commit now to rejoining a reformed EU and accept there is an entry fee to shaping it, paid in the political capital generated by ending Britain’s red lines including the blanket opposition to free movement.

Those of us who believe in New Labour as a political tradition will see the significance of a ten-year plan. It is our politics, after all. And as in 1997, 2001 and 2005, there is a willing audience. There’s a public out there whose reservoirs of optimism are depleted but not gone, who believe that Britain can get back on its feet, and that there is as much opportunity as challenge in the world. They voted for a New Labour agenda before, and they would vote for it again.

This is my first post and the reason for creating this Substack is in the essay. New Labour needs to be argued for again, not as a set of policies or personalities from the 90s but as an approach to politics, applied to the age we're in. Those of us who believe in the New Labour tradition have fallen short in winning the battle of ideas, or maybe even the battle that ideas matter in the first place. This is my attempt to change that. That means ideas, arguments and the occasional fight, and it needs people who want to build the tradition rather than just remember it. If that's your politics, subscribe and share.